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Ok, those who have been following Bussard Fusion research have been a little frustrated lately. The last round of experimentation came to an end in August, the data were presented to the funding authorities, and for the last couple of months we have had silence.

Now, I took heart from the fact that Dr Nebel, research leader,Â had earlier reported WB 7 as “running like a top”, and that after research ended the team were kept together. My reasoning was that if the data were not encouraging the group would have been disbanded.

The Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, China Lake, CA intends to procure on an other than full and open competition basis a service to provide: 1) Research of Electrostatic “Wiffle Ball” Fusion Device. The contractor is to specifically investigate the required instrumentation to achieve spatially resolved plasma densities and spatially resolved particle energies. This requirement is sole sourced to Energy Matter Conversion Corporation, 1202 Parkway Drive, Suite A, Santa Fe, NM 87501, as the only company in the world investigating and developing this type of device.

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You may be aware that horticulturists add CO2 to greenhouses, boosting the level of this deadly pollutant in make the plants grow both faster and more lush. Some pollutant huh?

On the basis of this reality, I have seen a few articles expressing puzzlement that a consequence of all this nasty anthropogenic CO2 stuff will be reduced agricultural production, leading us all to get a little hungry bye and bye. Personally? I have always thought this was a load of scaremongering twaddle, worth as much as a bucket of foetid dingos kidneys.

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Another of our transformative technologies posts – Here’s something interesting, have you ever heard of a catom? The fundamental building block of a cat right? Did you know that stroking a cat releases negative ions? I bet that’s the only circumstance where a negative ion is a cat ion.

Cat ion? Cation? Geddit?

Oh, never mind. Lets get to the point.

Catoms are the fundamental active unit in claytronic devices. Any the wiser? Well, you will be.

Sometime in the next five years the first primitive claytronics constructs will start being demonstrated, they will be affecting your lives within ten, and within twenty years they will be transforming human existence in ways that only the most visionary are starting to get glimpses of. If it gives you any hint, one of the world leaders in claytronics research is Intel; and they intend it to be BIG. Only they call it Dynamic Physical Rendering.

Ok, catoms/claytronics. Claytronics is the engineering/marketing term for a varient of programmable matter, and a catom is a single unitary particle containing all the active components that allow it to interact with other catoms and the outside world. As wikipedia puts it “sub-millimeter computers that will eventually have the ability to move around, communicate with other computers, change color, and electrostatically connect to other catoms to form different shapes”.

In other words, they aggregate together using magnetism, talk and cooperate via digital radio, autoconstruct dynamic mesh networks, flash at you in whatever colour you wish, and otherwise obey your every command.

3D fax?

Yep, thats right, different shapes. In fact, any shape you damn well wish. And within limits, any texture you wish as well. Fibres, particles, solids, you name it. And given that each catom can act as a pixel, whatever colour takes your fantasy.

Boggled yet? THIS IS NOT SCIENCE FICTION, and it is not something for your grandkids. It will be for you.

Right now? Intel report that they are producing catoms of millimetre size, and expect to shrink them to micron size within 5 to 10 years.

Ok, at millimetre size, assuming reasonable eyesight, and better than mine is becoming, you will be able to see each component, but at micron size? Forget it.

What colour do you want your car today?

Colour? Hell, what shape do you want the bloody thing?

This is where manufacturing techniques come into play, at a dollar each, of micron size, only the military will be able to afford to play with the things, but at a couple of cents per million? A million, sounds like a lot huh? At one micron each a million catoms would cover exactly one square millimetre. A couple of cents per billion maybe, giving us a cubic millimetre, then they will start becoming affordable to the rest of us. Making these things in usable quantities will give mass production and economies of scale whole new meanings.

Still, spray on televisions anyone?

Two inch high renderings of the players scarpering around your tabletop, as Geelong takes on the Gold Coast in the 2019 AFL Grand Final?

Seriously, when you look at this stuff, why would anyone bother with a God when there are human engineers around to admire? After all, what has God ever done for us? And what have the Intel engineers done?

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A recent article of mine had something of a vogue and it was taken-up by the Devil himself in his Kitchen. It was also taken-up by an unofficial BNP blog in Wigan. Hmm… Chris Mounsey is a star of the Libertarian blogging world and the BNP are a bunch of National Socialists who apart from their racism have a large number of very strange and dangerous policies. Well, that’s the ‘net for you and everyone is welcome to read my rants or Cats’ mewlings and frankly, the more the merrier. Because this is not meant as an echo chamber. If possible I would like people to read this and, well, change, as Perry de Havilland of Samizdata (another star of the libertarian blog scene) would put it, their “metacontext”.

The sad truth is that the BNP and the likes of RESPECT are basically the same thing. Their economic policies are both boilerplate socialism and both equate criticism of Islam with racism. I don’t and I frankly find the conflation of race and idealogy to be one of the strangest enduring fallacies of the age. You can see something similar in the current US election campaign. The very idea that a Black American might vote for McCain is seen as staggering.

I am worried about one thing in particular. There are many good anti-jihadi websites out there. Jihadwatch and LGF spring to mind (though least said about LGF’s commentariat soonest mended) but there are also nutters and oportunists such as Gates of Vienna (which sometimes seems to be almost gleefully anticipating a European Christian vs. Muslim Civil War). GoV is based in the USA and I guess it’s bloggers are planning on getting in beer and pretzels and watching the fun unfold on CNN.

And this is the problem. I am anti-jihad. I am appalled at some of the allowances being made to Muslims in this country. I am appalled at the, for want of a better word, Muslim pork-barrels we pay to try and keep them sweet (or unradicalized as the jargon goes). I am dissapointed by the way in which none of our mainstream political parties or the mainstream media is prepared to say the unsayable (for fear of being deemed racist or something*) and at the heart of the problem of terrorism and legal jihad and the hectoring and harrassment indulged in by various Islamists is Islamic all the way back to the Qu’ran and Muhammed.

But I am not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn in desperation to the Xenophobia and hatred and poisonous nationalism of the likes of the BNP as the likes of Gates of Vienna sometimes suggests we may have to. If this blogs posts on Islam serve any purpose it is to demonstrate that it is possible to find Islam a nasty and dangerous ideology without having to embrace an equally nasty and dangerous ideology and that being anti-jihad doesn’t automatically make you a racist loon or ultra-nationalist.

*Or indeed suffer the fate of Salman Rushdie or Theo van Gogh.

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The simple fact of the matter is the LA Times, in withholding this tape, is knowingly and with intent lying in order to subvert the democratic process, in clear conflict with the principles which any ethical publication would hold.

The LA Times is hiding an incriminating video of Obama with radical Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi.

I do hope that during this walk no one is so foolish as to demonstrate, well, oh, I don’t know; how to roll a cigarette maybe? Or how to tie a Windsor knot? After all, as we all know, a demonstration of any sort by a freeborn Englishmen, or Englishwoman, before the Houses of Parliament is now illegal. Well, illegal for all bar one.

Have a bracing day.

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Today, the French, the ungrateful wretches, are having a revisionist conference about the Battle of Agincourt. Their historians apparently claim the English weren’t that outnumbered, that the French were “heroic” and moreover that we didn’t play nice with them. Diddums.

In fact they’re accussing us of “war crimes”. Yup, 593 years after a battle which occured 449 years before the adoption of the first Geneva Convention they’re carping about war crimes! Losers.

Frankly, there is only one appropriate response and we all know that gesture…

PS. Today is St Crispin’s Day. I hope you shall all raise a glass to King Harry and his lads tonight!

Counting Cats (CC) was taken to task by several other commenters for being too squeamish and perhaps even morally neutral about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here. While I don't share CC's reaction to the video, I rejoice in his (her?) existence. What kind of a world would it be if people like CC didn't exist or if they had to hide their views? Who knows, we might all be living in something akin to Somalia.
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CC's civilized response is precisely why our military is a force for good in the world.